The chief operating officer of giant arms firm BAE, Steven Mogford, is today named in a BBC programme as the man behind the company's "slush fund", which made £60m of corrupt payments to Saudi officials, including providing prostitutes, Rolls-Royces and Californian holidays.

Mr Mogford, 48, is also accused on tonight's Money Programme of giving orders to suppress an internal investigation into the slush fund.

The Guardian is publishing these documents on its website today. They directly implicate one of the arms firm's most senior executives in a spreading scandal.

Last week a Ministry of Defence civil servant, John Porter, was arrested and questioned about alleged unauthorised free holidays and gifts he and his wife received from BAE's slush fund.

The documents we are publishing today suggest that BAe used an elaborate process of false accounting to make huge payments, many of them to the top official responsible for Saudi arms purchases, Prince Turki bin Nasser.

For instance, one single month's file lists 23 payments, totalling almost £1m, made for the benefit of top Saudis in August 1995.

These include cash paid into American Express accounts; the hire of a yacht in California and stays at luxury hotels in the United States and Spain.

The payments were made by a "front" private travel agency and listed on a monthly invoice to BAE's "customer relations executive", Wing Commander Tony Winship, who operated from a London hotel suite apparently unconnected with the company.

The entries were written in code: "T1" was Prince Turki, "N1" was his wife, Nora.

The invoice was then re-written on a single sheet of paper. It simply stated: "Accommodation services and support for overseas visitors."

Wing Cdr Winship sent the bill to Mr Mogford at BAE's headquarters at Warton, Lancashire, writing: "Dear Steve, Please find attached the August invoice from Travellers World as arranged."

Mr Mogford scribbled on it two days later "OK to pay" and signed it. BAE's finance department paid £987,365.03 into the travel agency's bank the following month.

Peter Gardiner, who ran Travellers World, tells the BBC the reason for the circuitous system was "minimum amount of paper. No paper trail and no one to intercept it. No more questions being asked about it".

BAE continued to remain silent about the allegations last night, other than to claim it had not broken the law. Since 2002 such payments have been a criminal offence.

The Serious Fraud Office and the MoD police are attempting to conduct a joint inquiry into the activities of the powerful firm, which critics accuse of having a stranglehold over the Blair government.

The former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, alleges in his memoirs: "In my time I came to learn that the chairman of British Aerospace [Sir Richard Evans] appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10. Certainly I never once knew No 10 come up with any decision that would be incommoding to British Aerospace."

In tonight's programme, Bribing for Britain?, it emerges that the Labour-dominated Commons defence committee allowed BAE to give misleading evidence, in which its then chairman, Sir Richard Evans, pooh-poohed the idea of the slush fund's existence.

Sir Richard said: "I can certainly assure you that we _ are not in the business of making payments to members of any government _ it is just not the way business is done."

Mr Gardiner, the travel agency whistleblower, tells today's programme he personally handled corrupt payments of up to £7m a year through a BAE front company throughout the 1990s until 2002.

Mike Hancock, the Liberal Democrat MP and defence committee member, said: "At the very minimum the defence committee should summon him back."

Since the Guardian first exposed the existence of BAE's slush fund a year ago, the firm has continued its apparently untroubled intimacy with Labour ministers.

Mr Blair intervened this summer to overrule an independent watchdog and allow the Air Chief Marshal, Sir John Day, to move straight from handling BAE affairs at the Ministry of Defence to take up a lucrative post with the firm.

According to documents obtained by the Guardian, the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, went to the firm's factory last September, after overruling his own permanent secretary and insisting on buying BAe's Hawk warplane for the MoD.